Wataya Risa was born in Tokyo in 1984. In 2001, aged 17, she made her literary debut with the Bungei-Prize-winning novel Install. Her second work, The Back I Want to Kick, won the Akutagawa Prize, making her the youngest ever Akutagawa Prize winner at 19 years old. The Back I Want to Kick has sold millions. Her other works include Isn’t it Pitiful, which won the Ōe Kenzaburō Prize, and Leave it Raw Nothing But Raw, which won the Shimase Prize for Romantic Fiction.Yuki Tejima is a translator from Los Angeles who is currently based in Tokyo. Her translations from Japanese into English include Mizuki Tsujimura’s novels Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon(Doubleday, 2025) and How to Hold Someone in Your Heart (Doubleday, 2025), Someone to Watch Over You (Pushkin Press, 2025) by Kumi Kimura, When the Museum is Closed by Emi Yagi (Harvill Secker, 2025) and the sequel to Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s best-selling memoir Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window 2 (Kodansha, 2025).

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Wataya Risa was born in Tokyo in 1984. In 2001, aged 17, she made her literary debut with the Bungei-Prize-winning novel Install. Her second work, The Back I Want to Kick, won the Akutagawa Prize, making her the youngest ever Akutagawa Prize winner at 19 years old. The Back I Want to Kick has sold millions. Her other works include Isn’t it Pitiful, which won the Ōe Kenzaburō Prize, and Leave it Raw Nothing But Raw, which won the Shimase Prize for Romantic Fiction.Yuki Tejima is a translator from Los Angeles who is currently based in Tokyo. Her translations from Japanese into English include Mizuki Tsujimura’s novels Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon(Doubleday, 2025) and How to Hold Someone in Your Heart (Doubleday, 2025), Someone to Watch Over You (Pushkin Press, 2025) by Kumi Kimura, When the Museum is Closed by Emi Yagi (Harvill Secker, 2025) and the sequel to Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s best-selling memoir Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window 2 (Kodansha, 2025).

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Wataya Risa was born in Tokyo in 1984. In 2001, aged 17, she made her literary debut with the Bungei-Prize-winning novel Install. Her second work, The Back I Want to Kick, won the Akutagawa Prize, making her the youngest ever Akutagawa Prize winner at 19 years old. The Back I Want to Kick has sold millions. Her other works include Isn’t it Pitiful, which won the Ōe Kenzaburō Prize, and Leave it Raw Nothing But Raw, which won the Shimase Prize for Romantic Fiction.Yuki Tejima is a translator from Los Angeles who is currently based in Tokyo. Her translations from Japanese into English include Mizuki Tsujimura’s novels Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon(Doubleday, 2025) and How to Hold Someone in Your Heart (Doubleday, 2025), Someone to Watch Over You (Pushkin Press, 2025) by Kumi Kimura, When the Museum is Closed by Emi Yagi (Harvill Secker, 2025) and the sequel to Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s best-selling memoir Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window 2 (Kodansha, 2025).

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